what’s right with you

Yale Cancer Center has a complementary medicine program for patients who are undergoing cancer treatment.  They offer massages, art classes, yoga classes and Reiki, all for free. 

One day when I was getting chemo, the social worker came over to my chair and asked if I’d like to participate in any of the programs.  I told her I was too sore to do yoga, and too sad to do art  – unless dumping  gallons of black paint on everyone and everything around me to make the world as dark as I felt counted as artistic expression.

 But I did agree to get a massage.

Up until then, I’d been the recipient of a lot of unhelpful, and even hurtful, comments from well-meaning friends.  “You’re lucky you have breast cancer — you get a free boob job,” one of my co-workers said.  “I wish I was on chemo so I could lose weight like that,” a friend said after I told her I’d lost 8 pounds in a week from vomiting incessantly after my first round of chemo.

At the beginning of my massage, the therapist dimmed the lights and turned on soft piano music.  “I know you’re sick right now,” she said.  “But think about the 98% of your body that’s healthy and pain free and working just like it’s supposed to.”  Her warm hands worked on the knotted muscles in my back as she continued, “I know there’s a lot that’s gone wrong for you, but for right now just try to focus on what’s right with you.” 

That thought rocked my world.  It stuck with me through the next six months of treatment, and it is still with me now.  To have someone recognize the good in me when everything seemed so wrong was an extraordinary experience. 

I could — and probably will — write about the amazingly damaging things people said and did while I was going through this experience.  But there were also some great people, many of them strangers, who encouraged me when I least expected it.

When I flew out to Portland last fall to interview for jobs here, my hair was just starting to grow again after chemo.  I wore my wig to my job interview, but I didn’t bother to wear it otherwise because it was itchy and uncomfortable.  I stopped at a Walgreen’s one evening to get some gum.  When I was checking out, the cashier, a woman in her 50’s who was sporting a pixie cut herself, asked me where I’d gotten my hair cut.  I instinctively bristled — I was really sensitive to comments about my physical apperance. 

“I didn’t get it cut like this,” I said defensively.  “I had chemo, and it’s just now growing back.”

She reached across the counter and grabbed my hand.  “Me too!”  she exclaimed.  “I’m doing a breast cancer walk this weekend,” she said.  “Are you going to be around?”

I shook my head and told her I had to fly back to Connecticut the next day.

“Well, sweetie, you come back next year and we’ll walk together, okay?”

I went back to Connecticut and had four more rounds of chemo.  When I did finally move to Portland a few months later, my hair was just starting to grow back out for the second time.  I wore my wig to work, but I didn’t bother to wear it otherwise.  My first week here, I got pulled over for turning left on a yellow light while I was running errands on my day off.

The police officer approached my car, and I rolled down the passenger side window.

“Do you know what color that light was back there?” he asked sternly.

“Well, it was green when I started to go through the intersection, but it turned yellow,” I said.

“That’s right,” he said.  “In Oregon, we don’t turn on yellow lights.”  He asked for my driver’s license, and said he was going to have to give me a ticket.

He looked at my picture on the license, the one taken three years previously when my hair was long and blonde, then looked back at the crew-cut I was sporting now. 

“Is everything okay with you?” he asked.

My eyes welled up with tears and I shook my head.  “I had breast cancer,” I explained.

“Oh.”  He handed me my I.D.  “I’m sorry to hear that.  Well, listen, you don’t need this now.” He tore up the ticket.  “I hear they have really good treatment for breast cancer these days.  I hope you beat it.”

And he let me go.

Sometimes hope comes when you least expect it.

Sometimes the kindess of strangers provides an unexpected refuge.

Sometimes you need someone to come alongside you, overlook your faults and problems, and recognize what’s special about you. What’s good in you.  What’s right with you.  

 

 

 

 

where is God when it hurts?

 

I took a year off between college and graduate school to work as a phlebotomist at a hospital near my parent’s home in Illinois.  My job involved going to every department in the hospital to collect blood from patients.  I spent time in the ICU, the cardiac floor, the maternity ward, and the psychiatric unit.  I even scrubbed into the operating room once to do a finger stick on a patient undergoing brain surgery.

The most memorable experience of that year was the night I got called to Pediatrics to draw blood from a 5 year-old girl who was being admitted with newly-diagnosed diabetes.  The nurses called me so I could draw blood off of her I.V. instead of having to stick her with a needle a second time.

I walked into the room to introduce myself to the patient and her parents, and I immediately recognized the patient’s mom, who was sitting in bed with her little girl.  She was a physician on the hospital staff that I had often seen rounding on her patients while I was doing blood draws on the floors.

When the nurses were ready, we walked the little girl and her mom down the hall to the Procedure Room.  Because the medical staff didn’t want children to associate their hospital room with pain, all procedures were done in a separate room.

As the doctor stood against the wall watching, we strapped her daughter onto a papoose board, and started her I.V.  When the needle went into her arm, the little girl shrieked.  As I collected her blood into vials to take to the lab, she kept screaming.  After a few minutes of crying without seeing any results, she lifted her head off the table and screamed, “MOMMY!  I’M IN PAIN!” 

I watched the doctor’s face, and noted the tears that welled up in her eyes as she watched her daughter continue to struggle against the restraints.  But, to her credit, she kept her distance and let us finish the procedure. 

The moment we were done, the doctor undid the restraints, scooped her daughter up in her arms, and carried her back to her room.

I’ve thought about this scene a lot over the past few years.  Pain is one of the age-old arguments against the existence of a loving God. If there really is a God, and if He is as loving as the Bible claims, why do humans suffer? 

C.S. Lewis tackled the issue with his book, “The Problem of Pain.”  Later, after he lost his wife to cancer, he wrote a candid account of his disappointment with God in, “A Grief Observed.” Decades later, another Christian author named Philip Yancey tried to answer the question in his book, “Where is God When It Hurts?”

This abstract, theoretical question became very concrete and personal two years ago when I was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 27.  Despite undergoing the most aggressive surgical treatment available, a bilateral mastectomy, the cancer recurred a year later.  I spent the next seven months undergoing four surgeries, eight rounds of chemotherapy and 30 sessions of radiation.

I was out of work for most of that year, and depleted the majority of my savings.  I lost friends I thought I could depend on, and when I needed them most, my church family kept a safe distance.

 I couldn’t understand why, when I was hurting so much, God seemed so far away.  And I couldn’t understand why, in spite of all the prayers of those who loved me, the cancer recurred and I had to suffer even more.  Where was God?  Why didn’t He intervene?  Why did He let the pain continue long after I said ‘Enough’? 

I struggled with these questions for a long time without arriving at any satisfactory answers until I thought back to that Procedure Room on the pediatrics ward. 

I thought about the paradox of that doctor.  The mother in her loved her daughter more than anything, and wanted her child to be healthy and pain-free more than anyone else on the medical team.   But the doctor in her knew that the very best thing for her child was an I.V. that could provide life-saving insulin and fluids, and blood work that could accurately diagnose the problem. 

And so, even though it caused her child pain, because the doctor knew it was ultimately in her child’s best interest, she allowed us to inflict pain that the little girl could not understand.  But at the soonest possible moment, she was there to pick her daughter up and carry her away from the pain.

And then I thought about the paradox of God.  How is it possible that He could seem so far away to me – and to other saints, like Job and David – and yet promise, “I will never leave you or forsake you”? (Joshua 1:5)  How could life hurt so much when He promised to give us, “a future and a hope”? (Jer. 29:11)

In the light of the woman who was simultaneously a mother and a physician, I began to see God as both my Father and the Great Physician, the One who is infinitely loving, and infinitely wise.

Sometimes, like the mornings when I can’t get out of bed because I am exhausted from my cancer treatments, or the evenings I watch the news and see victims of natural disasters who are dying of starvation and diseases, I wonder where God is.

And then I think, He’s the loving, all-knowing Father standing against the Procedure Room wall of life, watching His children suffer as tears well up in His eyes, waiting for the moment when our trial has finished its work in our life, and He can pick us up and carry us home.

Where is God when it hurts?

He’s right here.  And He’s been here all along.